The Costumes of WeHo’s 23rd Halloween Carnival

In LA, you get quite a few options at Halloween-time, ranging from low key to BA-BLAM. There are the neighborhood dives with drink specials and scary movies on the telly. There are the swanky clubs, the “balls”, the costume parties in the hills. There is the Hollywood Forever cemetery’s Dia de Los Muertos festivities, the spoooky Griffith Park hay rides, and the haunted houses, too. All this is well and good, but if you want to catch some serious Halloween spirit, the annual West Hollywod Carnaval the the ultimate in fun.

Celebrating its 23^rd year, the 2010 Carnaval [yes, that's how it's spelled] pulled out all the stops. Six stages hosted costumed attendee dance-offs, DJs, emcees, a screening and re-enactment of The Rocky Horror Picture show, and live musical acts. America’s Got Talent runner-up and entertainer extraordinaire, Prince Poppycock, was given the title of Honorary Mayor of WeHo to roaring applause. A performance by Tranzkontinental – a mash-up supergroup featuring a rotating cast of LA’s hottest drag queens – was followed by thousands of attendees taking part in a record-breaking staging of the Time Warp, in honor of Rocky’s 35^th anniversary.

As always, creative, hilarious, naughty and downright repulsive costumes were aplenty. Though just about everyone was making some form of effort amidst the towering, immaculate queens and 6-foot-tall penises, my top four most memorable costumes were a glowing home-made LadyTron outfit, a bed photo-booth, complete with pink sheets and a jolly bearded man in tidy whities,

The Blackened Prawn Cafe, serving up BP-oil-soaked shrimp, and king Arthur from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, complete with with a coconut-clacking knight.

After 11pm, as the party people slowly cleared Santa Monica Boulevard and made their way elsewhere through discarded confetti, feathers, and balloons, one thing was certain: there is nowhere quite like West Hollywood on Halloween. Nowhere at all.

Words and photos by Zoetica Ebb.